Visual Art and Yoga: A Potent Mix

Recently I took a yoga class at The Studio@620, an art space on First Avenue South in my hometown of St. Petersburg. As my fellow yogis and I spread our mats out on the concrete floor a few feet away from each other in front of our Ashtanga yoga instructor, Annica Keeler, I found myself staring (and smiling) at the nude backsides of three young women strolling toward a building that looked like a space ship that just landed. The stark naked women were in a photograph displayed on the wall, part of an exhibit called Instant Nostalgia featuring photographs by Michigan photograph Harvey Drouillard. Drouillard took the scene at the old St. Petersburg inverted pyramid pier in 2014, just before the building was torn down,

Douillard has made a career of posing nude figures at iconic spots in American cities. He calls his art "Guerrilla Nudes in public." As the description of the Studio's exhibit put it, "His black-and-white-photographs are intended to make people smile." 

The photograph was the perfect complement to my yoga session. After all, as the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh once said, “Smiling is a kind of mouth yoga.”

        Yoga instructor at The Studio@620, Annica Keeler

Annica Keeler, a certified Ashtanga yoga teacher, began our class by telling us that our yoga routine was going to tap into the energy of the half Moon. That was the phase of the Moon that was rising that evening in the night sky. “We’re going to open up our hips today. It’s always good to work the hips because we sit so much these days. We sit in the car, we sit at the computer, we sit, we sit, we sit,” she began as I glanced at Drouillard’s amusing photograph behind her. “Yes, very hip.”

I wasn’t sure if she was referring to our upcoming asana poses or Drouillard’s smile-inducing artwork on the wall. Maybe both.  

Here in St. Petersburg yoga and art are a popular mix. In addition to The Studio@620, three other art spaces juxtapose the ancient art of physical postures (asanas) and breathing techniques (pranayama) with amazing visual artwork: The Woodson African American Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts and The Dalí Museum. 

All four venues give participants the opportunity to pay tribute to both the Sun and to the art that is housed on their walls. The yoga sessions at The Studio, which are offered every second Monday of the month at 6:30, have an added bonus: not only is the artwork is right in the room where you are practicing your Sun Salutations and your Downward Facing Dog, but since the exhibits are constantly changing there, chances are as you twist and turn on your mat, you will be surrounded by entirely new art each time. 

But is yoga itself an art form? I posed this question to our instructor just before our class. Actually what I asked Annica Keeler was -- "Skulle de säga att yoga är en konstform?" She was born in Sweden and since I'm trying to learn the language of my maternal grandparents, I asked her if I could try to conduct my interview with her in Swedish.

Keeler came to live in the U.S. more than 27 years ago. She first worked in the tourist industry. Now her day job is Development and Community Relations Director for the Tampa Bay Times where she directs that newspaper's fundraising efforts. She has worked for the paper for 18 years in various capacities, from marketing and community relations to administrative support for the CEO of the Times Publishing Co. She has been married for 26 years and has two adult kids, a world traveler and an aspiring baseball player.

Below is my interview with Annica Keeler, edited for clarity. I’ve included both  my original exchange in Swedish and an English translation. Here are three things I learned from that interview and my yoga workout with this dynamic woman: 

1. I need to learn more Swedish.
2. I need to do yoga more than once a month.
3. Yoga may or may not be an art form, but doing yoga surrounded by art definitely is a unique artful experience that I will gladly sign up for again.

Yoga at The Studio@620 

MARGO HAMMOND: Do you consider yourself an artist? A yoga artist?

...Ar du en konstnär? En yogakonstnär?

ANNICA KEELER: No, no, I really don’t. Some people might see it is art, but for me yoga is more of a philosophy. A lifestyle.

....Nej, nej, det gör jag inte. Kanske andra kan säga det. Konstform? Men nej, för mig är yoga inte en konstform. Det är en filosofi. En livsstil.

 MH: What are the health benefits of yoga?

...Vilka är hälsofördelarna med yoga?

AK: Yoga has many benefits. We become more flexible, of course. But more importantly, it’s an inside job. It can help to slow down your nervous system, which leads to a row of other health benefits. We learn to breathe better and deeper, leading to more oxygen intake. These things can help lowering the blood pressure and the risk of heart problem. It also helps us sleep better. These are just a few examples.

...Yoga har jättemånga. Som att man kan bli mer flexibel, förstås. Det hälper på insidan. Det lugnar vårt nervsystem, vilket i sin tur hjälper alla andra organ. Andningen gör att du lär dig ta in mer syre och när organen får mer syre så blir de friskare. Att andas rätt kan hjälpa oss att sänka blodtrycket vilket leder till allt från lägre risk för hjärtproblem till bättre sömn.

 MH: Health for the body, but also mental health? 

...Hälsa för kroppen, men också mental hälsa?

AK: Absolutely. Yoga not only has physical benefits but mental benefits as well. You practice patience, you become calmer – so when facing obstacles, you are in a better position to handle them. This is, in part, the philosophy of yoga. You learn to breathe with intention, and to be in the present moment. And when you are in the here and now, you don’t let the past or the present direct your mood. So, in a stressful moment when you might go into “fight or flight,” the parasympathetic nervous system keeps you in the safe “rest and digest” mode. And that feels mentally great. You usually feel happier when you can process your trauma on the yoga mat.

....Absolut. Yoga är inte bara för det fysiska utan även för den mentala hälsan. Ja, ja, man lär sig. Man lär sig tålamod, man blir lugnare, man lär sig hantera svåra saker bättre— detta är filosofin av yoga. Man lär sig att andas med avsikt (medvetet), och att vara här och nu. Och när man är närvarande, låter man inte det förflutna eller framtiden, ändra ens humör. Så i en stressful situation när man kanske går in i  “fight or flight”, kan det parasympatiska nervsystemet hålla dig i det ”säkra viloläget”. Att inte vara rädd helt enkelt. Och det käns mentalt jättebra. Man blir oftast gladare när man kan bearbeta trauman på yogamattan.

MH: When did you begin to do yoga?

...När började du yoga?

AK: 1995

MH: Why did you start to do yoga?

...Varför började du yoga?

AK: Well, that’s a funny story. I had met my husband Jay (who I didn’t know would be my husband) so I stayed in Miami Beach and got a job at a gym. Madonna exercised there and I was the biggest Madonna fan in the world. So one day when Madonna was running on a treadmill, I got up and stood next to her and talked to her. She said she had started doing Ashtanga yoga. I wanted to be like her, so I took an Ashtanga class. My first introduction was to sit crosslegged for 45 min. It was awful! But I continued and got hooked.

...Det är rolig historia. Jag träffade Jay, som nu är min man, på en resa till Miami Beach, och blev kvar. Jag fick jobb på ett gym som Madonna gick på, och då var jag var världens största Madonna fan. Så en dag så när Madonna var där så sprang hon på en treadmill, jag gick upp och ställde mig jämte och pratade. Då sa hon att hon hade börjat yoga med Ashtanga yoga.Jag ville vara som henne och testade Ashtanga yoga. Min första klass satt vi i 45 minuter med benen i kors utan att röra oss. Det var det värsta jag varit med om i hela mitt liv. Men jag fortsatte och på den vägen är det.  

MH: When did you start the first yoga class here at Studio@620?

...När var den första yogaklassen här på Studio@620?

AK: In 2017. I had finished my Ashtanga yoga teacher training and practiced with a large group of friends. Once a week we did yoga at someone’s house or out in a park, to get my practice in. When I graduated, I had nowhere to do yoga, so I just asked The Studio@620 if they wanted to offer yoga on their program. Of course, here the answer is always yes.

...In 2017. Jag hade avslutat min yoga lärarutbildning i Ashtanga. Jag hade en stor grupp människor som jag tränade med hela tiden. En gång i veckan yogade vi hemma hos någon eller ute i en park, så jag fick träna. När jag tog studenten hade jag ingenstans att yoga, så jag frågade Studio620 om de ville erbjuda yoga. Naturligtvis, här är svaret alltid ja.

 MH: Is yoga popular in Sweden?

...Är Yoga populärt i Sverige?

AK: Very popular. I think it’s popular all over the world.

...Jättepopulärt. Jag tror det är populärt över hela världen, egentligen jättepopulärt.

MH: How often do you recommend that people do yoga? Should we do yoga more than once a month?

........Hur ofta rekommenderar du att folk gör yoga? Ska vi göra yoga mer än en gång i månaden? 

AK: If you want to reap the mental and physical benefits of yoga, I suggest three days a week (at least). Less than that might be like starting over every time. Steady and constant practice will result in overall health and a sense of well-being. But it’s still good if you do it twice a week. It’s always good.

........Om man vill få de mentala och physiska fördelarna med yoga så föreslår jag minst tre dagar i veckan. Annars kan det kännas som om man börjar om var gång. Stadig och konstant praktik resulterar i bättre hälsa och en känsla av välbeffinande. Men det är ju ändå bra om man gör det två gånger i veckan. Det är alltid bra.

 MH: Do you do yoga every day?

...Du gör yoga varje dag?

AK: Every day (almost). I practice for my well-being. I suffer from RA and yoga helps to keep me mobile and pain free. Of course, I have poses I don’t love, like backbends. Those are hard for me, so I might not do much of them.

.......Varje dag (nästan). Jag måste praktisera var dag för mitt välmående. Jag har reumatism och yogan hjälper väldigt mycket. Så klart tycker jag inte om alla övningar, har till exempel svårt med bakböjningar och gör de inte konstant.

MH: Is it harder to do yoga as we age?

...Är det svårare att yoga när vi blir äldre?

AK: Yes and no. The style becomes different. My yoga has completely changed. Ten years ago I was always upside down. I loved to push myself into pretzel moves. I loved taking my body to the edge, putting a foot behind the head. But now with the rheumatoid arthritis I can’t do that. Getting older also comes with less mobility and more stiffness. There are those who are full-time yoga teachers who just do yoga all the time and of course they keep up. But it also depends on how your bones age. We all age differently. For me the biggest change has been mental. I don’t have that ego drive anymore. I don’t feel the need to be upside down or to do pretzel moves. I look more inside and how I feel. Does this feel good? No? Then you shouldn’t do it

....Ja och nej. Stilen blir annorlunda. Min yoga har ändrat sig helt. För tio år sedan så var jag jämt upp och ner. Jag gjorde alltid galna poser och älskade det. Jag älskade ta kroppen dit — lägga i foten bakom nacken och allt sånt. Men nu har jag ju ledgångsreumatism så sånt gör jag inte längre. Med åldern blir vi också stelare. Det finns de som har jobbat som yogalärare i många år och tränar var dag, de kan kanske hälla sig smidigare än människor som inte spenderar timmar dagligen på mattan.  Men det beror också på hur ditt skelett åldras. Alla åldras olika. Men för mig är det också den mentala ändringen. Jag har inte det ego drivet längre, att man måste stå på händer, att man måste göra de coolaste poserna. Man går mer inåt och känner in i kroppen. Känns det här bra? Nej? Då ska du inte göra det.

MH: Is your class good for all ages?

...Är din klass bra för alla?

AK: Yes, it’s good for everyone. When I teach a class with people who have practiced yoga for a long time, then I think differently. Then it might be more advanced. At my classes here at The Studio I do a little of both, easy and hard – because I know that every month there will be people attending, who are new to yoga.

..........Ja, det är bra för alla. När jag kör en klass med folk som har gjort yoga länge, då tänker jag annorlunda. Då blir det mer poweryoga och mer ashtanga mer avancerad. På mina klasser här på studion gör jag lite av båda — lätt och svårt — för jag vet att varje månad kommer nya människor som aldrig gjort yoga.

 MH: How many people come to the class? 

...Hur många kommer till din klass?

AK: Today when it’s pouring we might only have five. I don’t know. We’ve had had up to 44. Before Covid we had a steady group of 25–30.

....Idag när det spöregnar kanske vi bara har fem. Jag vet inte. Vi har haft upp till 44. Innan Covid hade vi en stadig grupp på 25 – 30.

 MH: Is yoga more popular with women?

...Är yoga mer populärt bland kvinnor?

AK: No not really. My classes often have more boys than girls so you never know who’s going to come. I think yoga is popular with everyone out there.

...Nej, egentligen inte. Mina klasser har ofta mer killar än tjejer så man vet aldrig vem som kommer. Men jag tror yoga är populärt för alla därute.

 

PLEASE NOTE:

A version of this article was published on September 5 at Arts Coast Magazine, the online journal of Creative Pinellas: https://creativepinellas.org/magazine/visual-art-and-yoga-a-potent-mix/  Those who follow this blog and live in the Tampa Bay Area will find specific information on how to join the yoga sessions mentioned above in that longer version of this article.

Yoga is offered in the Dalí Museum’s Raymond James Auditorium overlooking the Avant-Garden – or outside in the Garden – every third Sunday of the month from 9-10 am

 

Post navigationA version of this article originally was posted on September 5 at Arts Coast Magazine, the online journal of Creative Pinellas. 

At the Intersection of Magic and Mystery

Question
What do you get when you mix mystery and magic?

Answer
James Swain

By Margo Hammond

     A best-selling Florida writer, James Swain has earned a slew of awards for his mysteries. His series (he has six of them) follow the exploits of a magician (Vincent Hardare), an ex-cop from Palm Harbor turned private eye (Tony Valentine), an ex-cop from South Florida turned child rescuer (Jack Carpenter), a psychic who sees the future and helps prevents crimes (Peter Warlock), a scammer (Billy Cunningham) and, in his latest, an ex–Navy SEAL who teams up with a FBI agent to find missing persons (Jon Lancaster and Beth Daniels).

     Swain is also a magician. For the past nine years (except during pandemic lockdown) he has driven from Odessa to St. Petersburg to offer free magic shows at the Hollander Hotel on 4th Avenue N. You’ll find him there every Thursday from 7-9 pm–just look for the plaque that says Magic Jim on a table in the Tap Room.

     Earlier this summer I went to the Hollander an hour before his show to talk to Swain about this double life as a magician and a mystery writer. We sat on a couch side by side, just beyond the bustle of the Tap Room.

     The cozy spot reminded me of The Study from the game of Clue, with flames from a fireplace lighting up a chandelier overhead. As we talked, I half expect a man smoking a pipe and wearing a trench coat to emerge from the old-fashioned telephone booth a few feet away.

     Mystery and magic, it turns out, constantly overlap in Swain’s life.

     “An awful lot of people who come to the Hollander to see my magic show have read my books and that’s a lot of fun,” says Swain who still has the boyish grin I remember when I first met him after the publication of his first mystery in 2001. “They come here and I talk to them about my books. People pull lines from books that I’ve totally forgotten about.”

     That's understandable. Swain has written 24 books–including a book on magic called 21st Century Card Magic. 

image courtesy of James Swain – photo by Tony Bock/Toronto Star via Getty Images

     His readers may come at first to meet James Swain, the writer. As Colette Bancroft, the book editor of the Tampa Bay Times once told Swain, “You must be the most accessible writer out there.” But, like me--even if they didn't think they even liked magic, they leave as fans of the art, blown away by Swain's eye-popping show. 

     Swain specializes in what is known as close-up magic, a sleight-of-hand performance for a handful of people seated at a small table. During his shows Swain keeps up a constant banter, weaving tales and telling jokes as he asks you to pick a card, any card.

     Then he dazzles you with a mind-bending trick involving the disappearance and reappearance of that card, leaving you slack-jawed. On occasion, he even makes baseballs vanish and reappear before your very eyes.

     “When I started to do magic, a professional magician said to me, ‘You’re a storyteller. All of your routines tell a story,’” says Swain who began telling stories as a child to overcome his shyness. A favorite trick of his wife Laura actually begins just like a story: It's called Once Upon a Time.

     “Mysteries prey on preconceived notions,” says Swain. “Magic does that, too. I do it all the time in my show. Writers do it all the time in writing. You take what people have as a certain order of things and you turn it upside-down.”

     Now you see the card, now you don’t. Oh, there it is under the magic cup. How did he do that?

     Like with a good mystery, it was right there in front of me and yet I didn’t see it. Both mysteries and magic involve a certain degree of distraction, but we want it to be artful distraction. We enjoy being thrown off by red herrings in a mystery and are delighted by the reverses that Swain pulls off in his tricks, but we want the twists to be earned.

     “There’s an expression—it’s fun to be fooled,” says Swain. “No it’s not. It’s not fun to be fooled. It’s fun to be entertained.”

     For Swain, which came first, the magic or the mysteries? “The magic,” says Swain without hesitation.

     “I was doing magic when I was ten. I started performing magic for money with my brother when I was 13, I think, and Tom was 16. We’d go to magic conventions together. Once Tom won the senior competition and I won the junior competition, pretty much doing an identical act – sleight of hand – but he was left-handed and I was right-handed so they looked very similar but they knew it wasn’t the same guy.

     “We got these big bowling trophy awards. We were getting some renown as magicians, making good money.”

     Then Tom went off to college and left magic behind. Swain, on the other hand, really “jumped into” it. And magic eventually fueled his career as a mystery writer.

     “To me, I wouldn’t have one without the other,” he says.

     Thanks to magic, he became an expert in casino scams and cheating, a subject that would inspire his early mysteries. “In the ’70s when I was living in New York, the cheats would come into the magic shops and I’d meet them. Because of my prowess with sleight of hand, I would show them something and fool them and then we’d start talking.”

     He also learned about scams from fellow magicians like Darwin Ortiz, who worked as a consultant for casinos to prevent cheating there. “I knew Darwin very well. I stayed with him one week during a train strike. He let me stay in his home out in Brooklyn. And that’s all we talked about.” In 1984 Ortiz wrote Gambling Scams, the first book on cheating in casinos.

     Casino scams became Swain’s first writing “hook.”

     “With writing, you have to have a hook. You better have a hook. Now I had a hook,” says Swain. “So I wrote this book called Grift Sense. I had heard about this thing where people in the casino industry could spot a scam by smelling that something wasn’t quite right about the way people were behaving. A lot of it was little stuff.”

     Like the time a casino detective caught a man on tape celebrating immediately after he won a slot machine jackpot. That, it turns out, is a sure tell.

     “When people win a jackpot there’s normally a six- or seven-second delay because they’re so used to losing,” explains Swain. “They’ve played thousands and thousands of times so the win doesn’t register at first. But this guy reacted right away.” A cheater nailed.

     Stories like that made their way into Swain’s first successful mystery series starring Tony Valentine, an ex-cop who is hired by the Las Vegas casinos to catch cheaters (Atlantic City casinos were his beat as a cop). Published in 2001 to great acclaim, Grift Sense put Swain on the mystery writer’s map.

     Swain wrote eight more Valentine books, one every year, with the last two (Jackpot and Wild Card) appearing in 2010 as e-books. Wild Card is actually a prequel to the whole series.

     In 2015 Swain launched another series involving casino scams, this time featuring a protagonist who was not trying to catch casino scams, but was pulling them off. Introducing master grifter Billy Cunningham from Providence, Rhode Island, who lived by a “cheater’s moral code,” the series began with Take Down, followed by Bad Action (2016) and Super Con (2017). A fourth Billy Cunningham book is currently in the works, says Swain.

     Not all Swain’s series have involved casino scams. He eventually found other “hooks.” In his latest series, set in Florida, ex-Navy SEAL Jon Lancaster teams up with FBI agent Beth Daniels to hunt down missing persons.

     For Daniels, the hunt is personal--she was abducted as a child herself. For Swain, the series is personal. His mother was abducted when she was seven--by her own mother. Her parents were divorced. She was living with her dad on Long Island in a little schoolhouse at the height of the depression in the 1930s when suddenly her mother showed up and took her to New York.

     She didn’t see her father or her brother or her friends for several years. Then just as abruptly her mother sent her back.

     “I didn’t know this history until I went up to see my folks and we drove down to Stonybrook which is where this all took place,” he says.  “My mom was in her 70s–I was in my late 30s, early 40s.”

     Swain’s mother also was the inspiration for Mabel, Tony Valentine’s feisty Palm Harbor neighbor, one of my favorite Swain characters. “She’s got an opinion about everything, kinda based on my mom,” says Swain.

     As a child, Swain was a voracious reader. At age 7 he read a series of biographies written for elementary school kids. “George Washington Carver. Teddy Roosevelt. By the time I graduated from elementary school I’d read every book in the library,” chuckles Swain, who was born in Huntington, Long Island.

     In junior high, he read true crime books like The Valachi Papers by Peter Maas. “We had a lot of mafioso on Long Island. They ran things there. They were part of the fabric.”

     No surprise, the first book of fiction that really hooked him was The Godfather — written by Mario Puzo in his Long Island basement. 

     It was his mom who was responsible for Swain meeting Puzo. When the author was invited to speak at her book club, she gave her son her ticket.

     “I remember Puzo saying that the best books were really about something else,” Swain recalls, “and when someone from the audience asked him what The Godfather was about, he said that it was about a boy taking over his father’s business.”

     Well, yeah–and a few other things, too, of course. Still, Puzo’s advice makes sense. Those of us obsessed with mysteries know the best ones are not only about plot, but about something else. Like casinos.

photo by Margo Hammond

     “I had a lot of great mentors,” says Swain who started writing short stories in high school. His teacher there was Kitty Lindsey, a published novelist. Later he joined the creative writing program at Hofstra University on Long Island, run by Arthur Gregor, a published poet and editor of Random House, and Sam Toperoff.

     “Professional writers would come out and speak to us and Toperoff, who lived in Huntington, had me interview them for the Hofstra paper. I think it was called the Chronicle,” says Swain. “I met Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Gerold Frank the biographer who wrote books on Judy Garland and Zsa Zsa Gabor, Cynthia Ozick, E.L. Doctorow and John Gardner.

     I’ll never forget that Vonnegut and Heller were both asked the same question — What advice do you give to aspiring writers? And they both gave the same answer–Make sure your first novel sells. This is how this business works. If you start a loser, you’re dead.”

     Actually, Swain’s first published novel, a story based on the life of Houdini’s nephew which came out in 1989, didn’t do so well. “It lasted about an hour,” he laughs, “but I don’t count that one.”

     In addition to those cheats who bent Swain’s ear in that New York magic shop, Swain also credits a number of fellow mystery writers for kickstarting his mystery career back in the early ’80s. “I was living in South Florida, going to Books & Books and reading all these great books,” he remembers. One of them was Jim Hall’s Under Cover of Daylight.

     “I read it in one sitting, couldn’t stop reading it, and then I started reading the guy who wrote Miami Blues, Charles Williford. He had the greatest title of any mystery ever, New Hope for the Dead. I know a lot of writers who were really influenced by that book and him.

     “Then I started reading James Crumley—Michael Connelly dedicates a book to Crumley. I was living with my now wife Laura. Crime was everywhere. You picked up the paper and read that down the street they found a head in a bucket. Odd crimes, non-definable crimes.”

     With material like that, who wouldn’t become a crime writer?

     Writing hasn’t paid all the bills though. With his wife, Swain created a highly successful advertising business (one of his clients was a Puerto Rico casino that banned him from the site when he called them out for cheating – they didn’t drop the account though).

     Now at 67 he and Laura are retired. He continues to write, publishing his books on his own terms now, often issuing them as e-books. Laura is still his first reader. “She’s the best editor,” says Swain. “She writes ‘Bullshit’ in the margins and tells me what works and what doesn’t.”

     It was Laura who convinced him to put the character of Tony Valentine front and center in his first book (Valentine wasn’t even his name when she read his first draft).

     One of Swain’s early mentors was a magician named Bob Elliott. When Elliott died in San Diego County in 2011, the San Diego Union-Tribune ran a glowing obituary of this ” amateur magician,” quoting a friend – “He never accepted money for performing. His favorite line was ‘Amateurs built the Ark, professionals built the Titanic.’ He was a teacher, a giver, he just wanted to spread the joy and the magic.”

     Sounds a lot like Swain. As a kid he dreamed of making a living as a magician. Now he does magic not just for money but because he loves it. A magician’s magician, he knows hundreds of magic tricks but he also enjoys inventing his own.

     Once he created a card trick called Capitulating Queens and gave it away to a friend whose magic shop was struggling. His friend sold ten thousand of them.

     During the pandemic Swain had time to invent more routines and streamline some of his old ones. He Zoomed and talked regularly with magicians across the country, including David Copperfield. “We grew up together,” says Swain. “We started talking a lot about our childhoods, how important our parents were to where we are now. Copperfield has a residency in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand, but during the pandemic his show was dark and I wasn’t working, so we talked a lot.”

     During one of their conversations, Copperfield gave Swain some helpful advice on how to decide which tricks to do. “It’s not up to you,” Copperfield told him. “The audience will tell you.”

     At seven o’clock, it was time for Swain's next show at the Hollander Hotel–time for him to try new and old tricks on his next audience. I was looking forward to seeing those baseballs appear and disappear like, well, magic. It's my favorite trick. "Yeah, I've been doing that one for 50 years. Everybody loves that one," says Swain.

     “When I came here nine years ago and met the owner, I knew it was the perfect place to do magic. It’s unique. People try to hire me all the time to do magic, but the magic’s here.”

NOTE: A version of this piece was originally posted at Arts Coast Magazine on July 11, 2023.

 

Here We Go Again: Book Banning in Florida

By Margo Hammond

          Lately I’ve been experiencing Yogi Berra’s déjà vu all over again, that dreaded sense of being caught up in an endless loop like in the movie Groundhog Day.

          Except that in this loop, the events that are being repeated are getting scarier and scarier.

          I’m talking about book banning in Florida. It has had a long history. Back in 1991, when I was book editor of the St. Petersburg Times, I wrote a column about book banning:  

“Poor Clay County. People there in rural North Florida are so ignorant that they wanted to ban My Friend Flicka from their elementary schools because it contains the words “damn” and “bitch.” Can you imagine? They also objected to William Steig’s Abel’s Island because it depicts a wine-drinking frog and — can you believe this one? — Little Red Riding Hood because that little girl on her way to grandmother’s house was carrying wine in her basket. How could anyone be so backward? Poor book-banning Clay County.

The inclusion of the Clay County cases on the American Library Association’s list of “Books Challenged or Banned in 1990-1991” certainly might give you the impression that its citizens are narrow-minded and backward. The ALA list, however, leaves out one important fact: Those parents in Clay County (and it was only two) were unsuccessful in their attempt to ban these books. The books were not used for two or three weeks while the Instructional Materials Review Committee, a group of about a dozen parents and teachers appointed by the School Board, reviewed the parents’ complaint. But then they were returned to the shelves, as the committee unanimously recommended.

Instead of receiving ridicule, Clay County should be commended for its fight against censorship.”
.. 

          I'm no longer book editor at the St. Petersburg Times. The newspaper isn’t even called that anymore (it changed its name to the Tampa Bay Times in 2011). But after 32 years—32 years!—there are still attempts being made to remove books from Florida school libraries. Except this time the challenges feel different.

          Back in 1991, the process to hear out complaints about individual books, while worrisome, felt like democracy in action. Parents’ concerns were addressed. In many cases provisions were made so that they could choose to have their child’s access to the books restricted – but the books were placed back on the shelves for other children to read.

          Now the attacks on books are more ominous, more organized and, alas, more successful. We are a long way from worrying about wine in Little Red Riding Hood’s basket. These aren’t just challenges to books with curse words and wine-drinking frogs in them. These are targeted assaults against whole categories of people. Today’s book banners are questioning people’s right to tell their own history — or to exist at all.

“I’m With the Banned” mug offered by BooksWares

           In Hernando County after fifth grade teacher Jenna Barbee was reported to the state for showing Strange World, a Disney movie written by acclaimed playwright Qui Nguyen with a biracial, openly gay character in it, 600 people showed up to voice their opinions about book banning at a school board meeting that lasted eight hours.

          “Men are to be men. Alpha males. Do you understand me? You have awakened all of the alpha male blood in this country with your leftist, woke ideology you’re pushing in here,” one man told those who were objecting to the removals of books with gay themes.

          “We do not want to have equity and inclusion in our schools,” said Shannon Rodriguez, the school board member who reported Barbee to the state because parents were not notified ahead of time about the movie’s airing (Rodriquez’s child was in Barbee’s class). ”We want to keep our schools traditional, the way that they were, we don’t want any of the woke or the indoctrination.” During the last elections, Rodriquez was backed by the conservative group Moms for Liberty.

          According to PEN America, which tracked book bans in schools from July 1 to December 31 of 2022, Florida ranks second–behind Texas–as the state with the highest number of book removals. The number of removals in Florida may even be higher, the group pointed out, as new laws signed by Governor Ron DeSantis have encouraged broad, state-level “wholesale bans” that restrict access to “untold numbers of books in classrooms and school libraries.”

          In March the American Library Association (ALA) reported that 2022 saw the highest number of attempted book bans (1,269) since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than 20 years ago, nearly doubling the 2021 number

          Of those titles, the vast majority were written by or about members of the gay and transgender community and people of color, according to ALA.The fourth most banned book in America from the 2021-2022 school year was, in fact, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the story of a Black girl who thinks she’s ugly because she doesn’t have blue eyes.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Study Guide available at teacherspayteachers.com

        

          That was the book that prompted a complaint in January in Pinellas County. Yes, only one  complaint from only one Palm Harbor University High School parent. As a result The Bluest Eye was pulled off the shelves of Pinellas County Schools for three months. 

          Like my Clay County example in 1991, that request for censorship was eventually rejected — after parents and students came out in droves at a Pinellas County Board meeting to protest. And, as I did 32 years ago, Tampa Bay Times columnist Stephanie Hayes applauded the committee for weighing in on the literary merit of the book and sent it back where it started: "in high school libraries for whoever wants it, and on select classroom syllabuses with the option for parents to opt their student out.” But Hayes also added, “It’s all just so exhausting. It’s difficult to feel elated at the tail end of a drawn-out process that never had to happen.      

          I’m feeling that same fatigue.   

          What are the book banners afraid of?

          “Well, we all know: They are afraid of readers—especially young readers—learning the truth about humans, about American history, about, perhaps, their own lives,” Jane Smiley, author of A Thousand Acres, wrote in a recent article in The Nation.

    

          “If you’re afraid of knowledge, if you want to ban books, you’re not afraid of the books, you’re afraid of learning,” agreed LaVar Burton in an online talk at the L.A. Times Book Club to discuss the State of Banned Books with Times editor Steve Padilla. “This is very punitive and very puny. It’s small of soul to ban books.” Burton, famous for his roles as Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Kunta Kinte in the miniseries Roots, has long been a reading cheerleader. He was the founder of the popular PBS series Reading Rainbow, a program that encouraged the love of reading and books among children. Last year the series was revived as Reading Rainbow Live, an interactive virtual version streaming on Looped. According to Burton, Reading Rainbow Live is preparing a special on banned books.  

          What drives book banning?

          “There is somewhere in there a desire to protect their children,” Burton acknowledged, “but protecting them from knowledge and protecting them from a real understanding of the world we live in is not good parenting.”

          The comparison with the Red Scare in the ’50s doesn’t seem like an exaggeration to me anymore. That’s the time when FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joe McCarthy teamed up to support bans of such books as Richard Wright’s Invisible Man, Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience (which, they said, encouraged men to protest American law and order), John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (which focused on pain and tragedy, making workers blame the rich on the Depression) and Robin Hood—Robin Hood!—(because he robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, promoting Communism).

          In addition to encouraging bans at home, in 1953 McCarthy sent two aides, Roy Cohn (yes, the same Roy Cohn who inspired the character in Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America  and who advised Donald Trump) and David Schine to search US Information Service Libraries in Europe and Asia for “subversive” books. Embassy libraries in Sydney, Tokyo, and Singapore reportedly even burned a few suspect, prompting cartoonists of the day to compare such McCarthy-inspired censorship with the Nazi book burnings of 1933.

          Among the subversive books singled out were ones by Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Thomas Paine, Langston Hughes, Upton Sinclair, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. Their books, McCarthy argued, were making the U.S. look bad and aiding Soviet propaganda against the West.

          But it was the ban of references to Robin Hood in Indiana State textbooks that turned out to be the last straw for five students at the University of Indiana. After librarians across the country began to pull Robin Hood off their shelves, the students launched a unique protest against McCarthyism and his attack on freedom of speech: They donned the silly green hats topped with a feather worn by Robin Hood and his Merry Men and launched The Green Feather Movement. Soon Merry Men protests spread to other campuses (giving rise, some say, to the political activism of the ’60s).

          Reading about those creative Merry Men protests got me thinking. What is the best way to combat this latest wave of book banning? Don a goofy hat like those Indiana students did to attract attention to the dangers of book banning and censorship? Perhaps.

          But meanwhile, here are a few other creative ideas to consider. . .

Donate to Organizations
Filing Lawsuits Against Book Banning    

          PEN America (a writer’s advocacy group), Penguin Random House (the country’s largest publisher), five authors whose books have been challenged, and two Florida parents who have children in the state’s public elementary schools have filed a federal lawsuit to fight back against the book bans in Escambia County (which includes the city of Pesacola).

          A single person in that county — an English teacher, no less — challenged more than 100 books for explicit sexual content and inappropriate language, including And Tango Makes Three, a picture book meant for elementary readers, based on a true story of two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who adopted a baby penguin. As a result of challenges, Escambia School District has removed or restricted more than 150 books (so much for Governor Ron DeSantis' claim that "no books have been banned in Florida."

          The suit against the Escambia ban alleges that these recent bans and restricted access to books in school libraries by conservative teachers and parents have disproportionately affected books that address racism and LGBTQ relationships, therefore violating constitutional rights to free speech and equal protection under the law.

          “I think the days of protesting in the streets are probably over,” Dr. Lindsay Durtschi, an optometrist who is one of the parents who joined this lawsuit, said on the Katie Phang Show on MSNBC.  “The days for writing letters are done.”

          By the way, another federal lawsuit also has been filed by the authors of And Tango Makes Three against another Florida county school board that has banned their book. In their lawsuit against Lake County School Board (and the state of Florida which they hold responsible for encouraging these bans), the authors also claim the ban of their book has partisan, non-pedagogical motives. As the lawsuit points out, of the 40 books that have been restricted in the Lake County school district, 37 make reference to the LGBTQ community and the three others contain content about LGBTQ issues and themes.

       

Make Banned Books Available

Free to Children and Teens 

at Creative Outlets Outside the Schools 

     

          Columnist Stephanie Hayes, to combat her fatigue while Pinellas County was fighting over Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, began slipping copies of the novel into Little Free Libraries in Dunedin, Palm Harbor and Tarpon Springs.

          When she reported on her “act of rebellion,” she received hundreds of emails and comments supporting her. “More than 120 letters so far, more than 400 TikTok comments,” she wrote. “One reader drove around looking for one of the copies I donated and sent a photo of her teenage daughter holding it.”

           "Book banning goes against our core values," says the LittleFreeLibrary.org, "and the issue is near and dear to our hearts." You can see a few of the ways we've been working to protect books from being banned here.”

          A Banned Book Library has been set up in the lobby of American Stage at 163 3rd Street North in downtown St. Petersburg, thanks to Keep St. Pete Lit. The group’s founder, Maureen McDole, also created a gift registry for banned books at Tombolo Books.

Foundation 451’s logo

          Adam Byrn Tritt, a high school educator in Brevard County and founder of Foundation 451, a free and inclusive library of challenged and banned books, held a pop-up giveaway at the Unitarian Universalists of Clearwater where young people were able to pick up two free books of their choosing. Children up to age 15 needed to be accompanied by a parent or guardian. Young people over 16 were invited to show up on their own.

Read Banned Books
and Encourage Lively Discussion
of Their Content with Others

         

Tombolo Books’s Banned Books Book Club next meets on August 24 via Zoom

          Even if you don't live in St. Petersburg, you can join the Banned Books Book Club offered by one of our independent bookstores, Tombolo Books. The club meets on the fourth Thursday of every other month at 7 pm online via Zoom. The next meet ups, hosted by hosted by Serena Utz and Kimberly Skukalek, are August 24 and October 26, 

          To receive email updates for this book club, sign up here. They have already read the young adult novel Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell and, of course, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. 

As a Last Resort, Try Satire 

(Cartoonists Are a Big Help) 

          To make a point that laws promoting book banning can backfire, two former Pinellas County educators filed a complaint with the Pinellas County schools against the presence of the Bible in school libraries, using the same criteria used to challenge dozens of other books lately in the county.

          The Good Book should be banned, Adam Graham and Brian Hawley argued because, after all, like The Bluest Eye it contains sex and violence. To drive their point home, the two also complained about two other beloved texts – Syd Hoff’s Danny the Dinosaur, a book which has been used in classrooms since 1958, claiming it teaches “gender identity” (all its male characters wear pants and all its female characters wear dresses) and the 1997 picture book Four Famished Foxes and Fosdyke because it promotes the F-word.

          Graham, a former English teacher at Pinellas Park High, and Hawley, who taught language arts at Largo Middle School, said, of course, they are not for banning any books. They actually want to protect all books from being banned, including the Bible. Their complaints, they out out, demonstrate how any book could be censored given the ambiguous language of House Bill 1467, the recent legislation signed into law by Florida governor Ron DeSantis. That law, which has been dubbed the "Don't Say Gay" law has encouraged the recent spate of book removals. If the books they have singled out can be realistically and intelligently challenged, they point out, then every book is at risk.

         Like the Merry Men, here are a few cartoonists who have understood how satire can be yielded as a deadly weapon in the fight against banned books. I begin with a cartoon by Clay Bennett, one of the cartoonist on staff when I worked for the St. Petersburg Times. He is still "getting in good trouble":  

 

 

NOTE: A version of this story was first posted in Arts Coast Magazine on April 25, 2023.